Regardless of size, 80,000 or 80 employees, 2 million dollars or 2,000 million in revenue; almost every company suffers the pain on multiple versions of truth, inability to perform in-depth analysis, inability to locate important information, inability to differentiate and prioritize problems, nonalignment of operations with strategic goals and data governance issues.

Belief that mid-size companies cannot afford and handle Business Intelligence. Small and mid-size companies which do not have vast resources are inclined more towards a complete, less expensive easier, fast-to-deploy-and-administer applications. They need to be agile and quickly respond to changing market conditions

Most of Business intelligence applications targeting this sector of market offers integrated planning, reporting and analysis solution e.g. IBM Cognos Express, it targets specifically mid-size companies and provides them an integrated package consisting of Reporter(Reporting), Advisor(Visualization), Xcelerator(Excel based analysis) and Planner(Planning), Cognos express provides capabilities of both Cognos analytics and Cognos TM1. Others in the same category are SAP Business Object, SAS etc. Some of other smaller BI vendors that target small and mid-size business market include Bitam, LogiXML, Targit and Dimensional Insight. Qlikview that held strong in mid-market until recently and now can also been seen getting adapted in much bigger enterprise environment.

Quick deployment, low-cost and ability to use external business knowledge and technology makes SAAS also as a good option for small and midsize companies. Microstrategy, one of the largest pure BI vendor, is soon coming up with Microstrategy Cloud Intelligence offering, which is in Beta testing right now enabling its BI software platform available as a service in the cloud. Good thing about SAAS is that the vendor hosts and maintains the entire BI environment including servers, operating system, BI application and network and small and mid-size companies can enjoy the elasticity and scale their implantation if needed.

Another considerations while picking up the vendor/tool is the license cost; is it server-based or on the number of users. Which model will give you that magic number that can you afford. Low cost vendor, Logixml gives you server license independent of number of users. If your company has lot more information consumers that generators that going for vendors that does not require a client license to be able to view the reports will prove a god option for you. Many vendors have now option where reports can be published over the web, these reports can be refreshed after every certain hour and can be viewed in a web browser.

Depending on the size and type of organization they could leverage using one or more following applications:

Planning Budgeting & Forecasting

Planning

Workforce Planning

Capital Asset Planning

Operational Planning

Margin Planning

Budgeting

Services Planning

Business Intelligence and Performance Management

Reporting

Dashboarding

OLAP

Data Mining

Real-time Decisions

Predictive Analytics

Customer Relationship Management

Channel Revenue Management

Order Management

Service

Marketing

Sales

Partner Relationship Management

Social CRM

Financial Management

Accounts Payable

Accounts Receivable

Fixed Assets

Asset Lifecycle Management

Cash & Treasury Management

Financial Control and Reporting

Financial Analytics

Governance, Risk & Compliance

Travel & Expense Management

Treasury Management

Disclosure Management

Financial Close Management

Financial Data Quality Management

Governance, Risk and Compliance Management

Financial Governor

Risk Management

Environmental Governance

Fraud and Error Reduction

Supply Chain Management

Procurement Management

Asset Lifecycle Management

Global Trade Management

Manufacturing

Order Fulfillment

Product Lifecycle Management

Logistics

Human Capital Management

Human Resource

Talent Management

Workforce Management

Workforce Service Delivery

Project Portfolio Management

Project Contracts

Project Grants

Project Billing

Project Costing

Project Resource Management

Please vote on the below and comment on this blog on what you think about the challenges faces by SMBs worldwide.